Just to piss myself off I made Clafoutis today with some pitted frozen cherries and super cheap rum (a bottle for 1 euro) instead of Cognac. It didn’t want to get done for some reason. Perhaps the gods of French Cuisine were trying to spite me for breaking tradition? I can’t say that I am satisfied with the way that it turned out but it was edible and that is the point right? Next time I am putting in some fucking brown sugar and baking it at a higher temperature that is what I… AH! I just realized I had the rack lower and I was using a casserole instead of a pie pan. I’m not sure how much influence either factor has on the end result but maybe that was the problem. I mean I cooked the crap for 20 minutes more than my recipe said. That seems more like an oven trouble don’t you think?
In other worlds I read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde which is the first book in the Thursday Next series. and I enjoyed it quite a bit even though just about everything but the writing and some of the characters was wrong with it. That includes: setting, plot, characterization, background, logic, exposition, conclusion/consequences, physics, etc. I also do not have much of a background in classical British literature or history and the book tends to assume that one does. But I’ve never even touched a copy of Shakespeare to my knowledge so of course I’ve never read or seen an adaptation of Jane Eyre either (though I have seen adaptations of Wuthering Heights for some reason) although it turned out I somehow knew the ending of it anyway. So I think that the limited intended audience (British people who actually read their assigned literature in school and remember it) has to be somewhat of a mixed bag. I’m sure that for the people with the background it is great, but it’s not really a very worldly book. Granted a lot of people can likely relate to the essential personal dilemmas of the main character and a moderate job of exposition was done on Jane Eyre without totally including the work. But to create a work that relies upon intimate familiarity with another work (or 20) that is not your own work detracts from it too greatly. Honestly even writing a sequel to your own work detracts from the sequel in so many ways but that’s another story. I must say that I’m also a bit miffed that certain pathos were just swept under the rug to lead towards the conclusion but I guess that people do change their minds sometimes for one reason even if a thousand others only reinforced their will before.
And in the end the book was “science fiction” and even though there’s such a thing as great science fiction there is no such thing as a great work of fiction that happens to be in the SF genre. That’s true of all genre fiction really, it tends to be even absurdly enjoyable but it’s never really that good. I got glimpses of greatness for the writer in this book, but chained to this series I don’t ever see him progressing that far. You never know though, and in the end I did like the work because I enjoyed it and I plan to seek out the others in the series at my earliest convenience.
I leave you to sort out the myriad meanings of these words over the holidays: The difference between a great work and a good work is exposure.
The Sky Before Dawn 